For a taste of summertime sadness, we're looking at Mike Mills’ semi-autobiographical bleak comedy Beginners (2010). We get into: the film’s tonality of “melancholic smile,” non-human actors, is this Mills’s All Fours?, Christopher Plummer’s silent expressivity (and “ascot game”), aging out of the gay bar, and nightclub as metaphor for life.
Mike Mills' Beginners and 20th Century Women are both deeply personal and generous films, acknowledging how impossible it is to ever truly know one’s parent or child.
While Beginners and In a Lonely Place are radically different films, both portray their characters’ attempts to close the distance between themselves and others, drifting through chiasmatic stories from fear to delusion to fear again.
How do you make anywhere home, if it never existed?




